You don’t have anything to do with it, she said.
What do you mean by that?
Yaani. . well, maybe. How do I know. I don’t remember.
You don’t remember?
How should I remember, I was asleep and dreaming. The dream I just told you.
You remember the dreams but you forget what was actually happening?
What — what happened?
God give me patience! All right, nothing happened! he said, seething with anger. He must start waking her up at night when he slept with her, he thought. He would wake her up and he would order her to remember everything. He would end this foolish performance that had begun on their very first night in the hotel. True, he had collapsed in the bathroom, but who wouldn’t have? What man would have been capable of withstanding the icy cold whistling along Dahr el-Baydar? Mansour alone withstood it. He fought back. He could not bear the idea of returning to Beirut in defeat. He would have been forced to stay in the Shahin family home while waiting to go to Nazareth.
Salim, the eldest brother, did not attend the wedding. When Mansour asked about him, the only answer he got was a cryptic sentence from Musa. Mansour was the only one among the extended family who did not know the story of Salim. From Musa he heard half the story, but still he did not understand why the rupture had happened. Musa told him that Salim had wanted to become a Catholic and enter the Jesuit order. He studied law at their university but then he went a little crazy. Salim had entered the university thanks to a reference letter from Father Eugene, who ran the Sunday school in a cellar vault attached to the Jesuit Fathers’ monastery in the quarter. It was not a real school. “Frère” Eugene lured in poor boys by handing out candy. He made them watch religious films and forced them to attend Latin mass. Salim was bewitched by the cinema. He took his brothers along to watch a film about the passion of the Messiah. He was astonished to see them all drop off to sleep. Instead of becoming absorbed in how light became images, instead of letting those images dazzle them, the boys fell asleep. Musa shrieked in fright when he saw the enormous shapes occupying the whole of the huge white screen. Only Milia was an enthusiast when it came to the cinema, but Brother Eugene told Salim that Sunday school was only for boys and Milia could not come in.
I’ll go back with you, spoke up Musa. I’m afraid of films and I’m going back with you. But Milia ordered him to go in with everyone else and she returned alone to the house.
Musa said that in Salim, Frère Eugene found a true iwazza. Mansour did not understand the expression, but he made as though he did. He always felt disgusted with himself when Milia stared at him, irritated, every time he asked her the meaning of a Beiruti expression that he didn’t understand.
It’s as though you don’t know Arabic, she said.
So he began acting as though he understood everything. When Milia came to live in Nazareth, rather than adopting her husband’s dialect and pronunciation — that of the town in which she now lived — she went on speaking in her own Beiruti way, words full and heavy with the flesh of the tongue. Beirut folks worked their lips and their tongues to weight down their words, and the syllables glided downward. Only Milia sang out her letters. She preserved the thickness of her local dialect but instead of pronouncing the sounds from her cheeks and tongue she launched them from her lips so that her words floated out soft and light, as rich and full as they were.
You don’t speak like Beirut folk do, he told her.
Inni!
The “I” came out tilted, slipping, reclining in the Beiruti way.
He did not ask what it signified to call Salim a gullible goose. He did not understand why their elder brother’s embrace of the Catholic faith had generated so much anger.
They’re all alike, he commented.
The mother’s eyes scored him as she pronounced the famous line which she said whenever anyone tried to engage her in dialogue about her son’s new religious choice. God is Orthodox, she said firmly.
But we are not Greek Orthodox, Mansour wanted to say, relying on what a priest in Jaffa had told him. The exchange had taken place in the thick of the heated protests in Palestine against the Greeks who had held sway over the Jerusalem Orthodox Church. The priest had said that the label Rum, even if it had come to refer to Greeks in general, was coined originally as an insult that the followers of the Syriac rite had flung at the Orthodox Arabs, trying to label the latter as agents of the Byzantine Empire. We were Orthodox Arabs who chose to believe in the two natures, divine and human, of the blessed Messiah, peace be upon him, the priest explained. We adopted the Greek part because our small minds somehow accepted our enemies’ accusation. They were able to make it stick.
Mansour told Saadeh and her daughter the story of the priest Yuhanna Aazar. Saadeh began to yawn while Milia, her chin cupped in her hand, gave herself up to her mute slumber. The man did not complete his story. He stopped halfway through, getting to his feet to return to the Hotel Amiirka in the carpenters’ souq where he stayed on his trips to Beirut — now more frequent, ever since he had succumbed to this love.
These feelings that people call passionate love had been alien to his life, Mansour told them. It was true that he was on the threshold of forty, and yes, he had known many women in his life, especially women of the night in Jaffa and Beirut, and he –
Please, please don’t use those filthy words.
I didn’t use any filthy words! I didn’t say anything abusive or insulting, he answered.
Please, that’s enough. No more!
Fine, he said. Anyway, we don’t use abusive language the way young men in Beirut do! You can’t speak to any one of them without their starting to joke with you by tossing out a curse word or two. Kayfak y’akh ish-sharmuta! How are you, Brother-Your-Sister’s-a-Whore! As if he’ll make you love him by saying this. At first I couldn’t bear it, and more than once I nearly got into trouble because of it. Then I got accustomed to it and that was that. There’s no need to get upset, Milia, my love.
He wanted to say to her that in all his past he had never felt the kind of longings that God put inside men to consume them. All it takes is a lowly matchstick to set a man’s entire body alight. He wanted to tell her that, yes, sometimes he had felt a smoldering in his gut that took fire through his body, and then there was not much else a man could do. But after meeting her he was suddenly aware of the emptiness that filled him from his heart to his feet. He felt on fire now, too, but it was different this time, because this was a flame he could not put out. He even wanted to tell her that when thoughts of her had led him to what they called the secret habit, the flame still did not go out. It just moved into his hand. But he didn’t say anything. He was afraid she would be angry and the wound lines on her neck would appear. Whenever a word or an observation upset her, three horizontal scars, from high on her neck down to her chest, glowed red. When he asked her once about the scars she said the nun was to blame.
She went into the bathroom and washed her neck. When she came out it had returned to a pure, undulating white.
This is the color of love, he said.
Mansour told no one that in the Hotel Amiirka fire and jealousy had burned his tongue. He sensed something mysterious in the unfinished story of Salim, and he had an uneasy feeling that somehow Milia was implicated in the rift that had broken the family’s collective spine. But it was only three months after the wedding that he learned the whole story. And then it dawned on him that the red scars on his wife’s neck were the remnants of a wound inflicted by a man called Najib Karam on a woman who had waited and waited for him.